The Kaliningrad Regional Court on Tuesday upheld a lawsuit seeking to annul the registration of the Yabloko party list for elections to the regional legislative assembly. The lawsuit was filed by the Communists of Russia party.
Yabloko's press service noted that the text of the lawsuit in Kaliningrad is 51% identical to a lawsuit filed by the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), which had previously led to the removal of the party's list in the Sverdlovsk region. In both cases, the claims concern, among other things, candidates' posts on Facebook and Instagram, which are blocked in Russia.
Ivan Bolshakov, who heads the regional part of the Yabloko list, said that "courts continue to hand down unjust rulings" and called such verdicts damaging to public trust in the judicial system. In his words, "the elimination of the legal opportunity to influence political processes opens the door to radicals."
The Kaliningrad region became the sixth region where Yabloko has been removed from the ballot. Earlier, the party's registration was annulled in Karelia, St. Petersburg, and the Pskov, Leningrad and Sverdlovsk regions. On August 10, the Supreme Court, acting on a lawsuit by the Rodina party, declared the registration of Yabloko's federal list for the State Duma elections unlawful; on August 17, an appeal was rejected.
The Communists of Russia lawsuit in Kaliningrad also cited the Supreme Court ruling, Yabloko's use of a line from Lev Oshanin's poem "May There Always Be Sunshine," the phrase "if only there were no war," a still from the film "War and Peace," and the publication of campaign materials on banned social networks.